“Although the listening experience of such a rise in power will vary greatly for listeners across the protected service area, all in-home analog listeners will experience some reduction in audio quality and most will experience a significant reduction in audio quality.”
How convenient. What better way to drive new digital radio purchases than by ruining the analog product? Sounds like they're taking a lesson from the implementation of AM-HD. Newsflash — reducing the analog sound quality of AM stations didn't drive people to buy digital radios and it won't happen on FM, either. It'll simply drive people away from the medium,
period.
What they don't seem to understand is that no matter how much you increase the digital power, there's still going to be mind-numbingly annoying dropouts in the audio even within the main service areas, due to signal loss. There is simply no way to overcome the physics of the matter on the existing broadcast bands.
Then on page 3 we have Jeff Jury of iBiquity swearing that HD Radio will be in cell phones by 2012. Ibiquity claims that 75% of cell phone owners would listen to HD Radio if they had it and put a value of 42.00 to have it in a phone. File that under "Fun with Statistics".
So basically it's the same 75% that would listen to an FM radio "occasionally" if it were built into their cell phones, who would still use the same radio if it had digital capabilities. Big whoop. If my next cell phone happened to have HD in it, I'd use it too
because I use my cell phone FM radio (with RDS) a lot already.
But the $42.00 number? I have to question the veracity of that. Unlike the rest of the world we're all hooked on subsidized phones. If it ain't free most people don't want it (iPhones and Nexus Ones aside). Going from free to $42.00 just because a phone has HD radio means a lot less phones sold, period. In a day and age where adding FM radio costs only pennies and THAT is seen as an unnecessary cost increase on the basic cell phone, I find it hard to believe people would be willing to pay an average of $42 for added HD radio capability. $42 for a good standalone HD radio? Sure. $42 more for HD radio in a phone? That's horse squeeze.
